SplinterBattle Weekly Challenge: Locking on to your Target for Practice

It has been a while since I blog on Splinterlands weekly challenge. I have taken quite a number of months off but given that Nov and Dec is the low period of my work, these 2 months give me times to return back to my habit of blogging. So here I am, trying to see if I could share my knowledge so that the readers could learn something from it.

For this week challenge, we are talking about the

Rule set: Target Practice

Description

For range and magic monsters, they will acquire the snipe skill and attack the 1st non-melee from the 2nd position onwards. So for Target Practice matches, the 1st position can generally quite safe from magic and range attack, and usually the 1st position will only be target by the opponent first position and maybe melee in the 2nd position with reach skill.

For this challenge, I will use 3 matches for reference.

Match 1

Match URL: https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_b2b02eb9b6c10ff201780577425ab44e&ref=namelessnameless

As it is a target practice match, you can see that I actually use baakjira in the 3rd place. Baakjira is a very good tank to absorb magic attack with its void skill and its huge hp with self heal can block even quite a number of range damage. Similarly, i also use wave brood to further counter their magic attack as it too has void skills and it even have return fire to damage the range monsters. Although you cant see in this match, although wave brood is quite similar with baakjira in skill set, baakjira can easily out-tank wave brood due to its self heal. Baakjira even has slow which sometime can turn the table over with the difference of just 1 speed.

Another strategy that stood out for me is Diemonshark fighting ability here. In normal matches, my diemonshark could easily be killed cause a single hit can destroy its armour with immortalis summoner, and it is quite vulnerable to magic attack. With snipe practice rule, you can see that my diemonshark only need to worry about the 1st and 2nd position. So if though his armor got shatter away after the 1st attack, it just need to survive the 1st wave of attack and after that, making full use of its enrage + trampling skill, it is able to deal insane amount of damage every turn!

Match 2

Match URL: https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_82f1e89114c3ca89117c48e3664d128b&ref=namelessnameless

This is quite a unique match. As the match rule pair Target Practice with Wands Out, so the 2nd position is the most dangerous as all the monster will attack the 2nd position except the 1st position or scatter ability.

I am thinking of choose between Thaddius Blood or Imortalis but I end up choosing Imortalise cause the void skill can even protect again blast since there is a possibility that the opponent can choose yodin and magic with blast can be quite powerful.

So from the above lineup, you can see that I decide to place my most powerful monster Runemancer Florre in the most dangerous position. Usually you would want to keep your most powerful monster in the safest place so that they could last as long as possible to deal the most damage. Yet, due to the low mana of 35, i realise that after choosing immortalis and having Florre, that is almost like 19 mana gone. In order to protect florre, I even use 2 triage monsters, leaving very limited available mana. So that is how i ended up with this crazy lineup. Overall, my 2 triage monsters are really keeping my florre well alive but my miscalculation is that the opponent have 2 stunner, making my powerful florre hardly able to do any damage. But choosing summoner with void and the opponent never bother to reduce my magic power, you can see that I still can quite easy to chip away some of their monsters even before my weak regal peryton die.

I also wonder if the opponent change the summoner to thaddius blood and put djnn muirat to 2nd position, it seems like I may end up losing, especially muirat has gaint killer skill that can deal massive damage to my florre. So I can just say that I am very lucky in this match.

Match 3

Match URL: https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_dbcb361c2c273a86d87f876f1e541471&ref=namelessnameless

With only 41 mana, it is quite hard for me to use the resurrect(s) + Iziar(taunt with maytr) combo as i would be left with 19 mana for the remaining members. And just so coincidently, my opponent end up using this strategy that I abandoned. Instead for me, I purposely use a low 2mana pelacor conjurer to absorb all the range and range attack. It has divine shield so works even better with resurrect. With its own high speed, it can also pose a threat in constantly missing range attack and even magic attack with its phrase skill.

For my line up, I actually divide into 2 parts, the main attackers will be my 1st and 2nd position melee since they will be free from range and magic. On the other part, I will try to boost my 3rd spot conjurer so it could last as long as possible. Adelade Brightwing works very well with Conjurer. She had speed boost which make Conjurer evade more. She has resurrect to reactive conjurer divine shield, making conjurer can tank a few more hits before it goes down. I also have time mage to slow and reduce the armor, making conjurer to evade more and my melee attackers easier to kill their front squad with the rust skill. Next, I use renova for its triage skill to heal my conjurer. This formation works well against lineup with heavy focus on ranges or magic. So as a result, I am able to achieve an easy win since the opponent chose a magic heavy team. However, I would like to highlight that this formation has plenty of weakness as well. Imagine that if the opponent uses Arkemis the bear in the 1st position, my 2 melee attackers basically cant deal any damage to the bear due to his forcefield. Another counter lineup is also putting dessert dragon in the 1st spot. It has retaliate and pierce, so it can easily make my melee to low hp, and if it successfully killed any1, the trample + pierce can deal significant damage to the next monster as well.
Another lineup that can easily wipe out my team is sneak team. You can see that I hardly have any protection against the back lineup as they are all busy trying to buff conjurer.

Overall

I hope that you readers will be able to have take away from my blog post. It is definitely not easy to battle at diamond or champion league so even after playing for so many years in Splinterlands, I am still learning a lot from my daily matches as I try to make sure that I view all the ranked matches.